The “Whole” which Socialism prioritizes above the Individual is a meaningless term utterly impervious to that multitude of qualities, moral, intellectual and otherwise, which distinguish each and every person on the planet. To sacrifice the welfare of the Individual out of concern for the “good of the Whole” not only violates every civilized notion of human achievement, it inevitably entails the oppression of those who have in fact achieved. Contemporary “intellectual” assaults on the very notion of Merit are of course an attempt to justify Socialism’s degenerate vision of the species.
Capitalism seeks to enhance human freedom and reward the merits of the Individual. In doing so it naturally unleashes those driven by the worst of human impulses. Hence the preoccupation with the Rule of Law by the designers of our Western Liberal Democracies. But the absurd notion that all endeavors at self-improvement are somehow rooted in greed informs the contemporary Left, leading it to malign the very concept of Merit and sacrifice the rights of the Individual at the altar of the Collective Whole.
In the name of Social Justice the South African government, as I have already discussed, has banished a good number of White farmers from their lands and turned them over to those they had previously oppressed. But as many of the latter know very little about farming, the country’s food production and economy have been seriously compromised. Is a preoccupation with “merit” and “efficiency” a mere Western Capitalist eccentricity or absolutely essential to human well-being? Did you know that in China, between 1958 and 1962, approximately 45 million people starved to death? And this was under a government officially devoted to the welfare of the common man! It is out of that same concern, of course, that Muslims, Christians, etc., continue to be oppressed in China for their failure to succumb to the Socialist dream, while here in the West those naively addicted to that dream have predictably come to support an ugly “cancel culture” which is the inevitable result of their ignorant, condescending vision of the rest of the species.
Our libraries teem with books by those obsessed with justifying the inefficiency and inhumanity of every one of history’s socialist experiments. But History speaks for itself.